


5 + 1 Hale feels

by JanaRumpandRCClara



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canonical Character Death, Derek Feels, Gen, Hale Family Feels, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-07
Updated: 2014-06-07
Packaged: 2018-02-03 17:49:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1753465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JanaRumpandRCClara/pseuds/JanaRumpandRCClara
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five things Derek misses, and one he still has.</p>
            </blockquote>





	5 + 1 Hale feels

**Author's Note:**

> This is all Jana's fault (as per usual) she had to go and make a playlist about the Hale house.  
> And I had to get all the feels.  
> It's almost four in the morning, don't judge the title or the summary, I couldn't think of anything better. 
> 
> Hope you enjoy it.

One. _(He missed his father’s cooking.)_

His dad had been the real cook of the family. He used to spend hours cooking meals for everyone, making sure everything was just heavenly. Was the first to wake up and cooked breakfast while singing. Derek had always loved to sit on one of the chairs, watching him.

His dad would let him taste the food before it was ready, patting his hair and asking what he thought of it. He would always let Laura steal cookies and Cora to put her finger on the creams. His father would never let their mom steal anything though, so the kids usually cheated his rules and stole things for her as well. 

Derek remembered being fascinated by how his dad could take all those raw ingredients and turn them in something fantastic. Remembered thinking that the food from those fancy places they sometimes went to, when meeting the other side of the family or something, wasn’t as good as his dad's. He whispered that to him once, and his father beamed wide. 

After the fire, Laura made sure to continue with the homemade food tradition, but she was not their dad. She was a good cook, but she didn’t love it. Mostly, she was sad for having to do this. Derek worked hard to learn how to cook, and they started spending hours on the kitchen trying to figure out what were the secret ingredients their dad used to add. They had a notebook where they wrote down every discovery. 

Cooking gained a new meaning. 

And then, Laura was gone. 

Derek couldn’t eat anything and enjoy it anymore. He couldn’t stand being on a kitchen, because all those memories – from his dad and from Laura – would just hit him too hard. He spend a lot of time eating take-outs or not eating at all. Everything tasted bitter or bland on his tongue.

Two. _(He missed hearing his grandma’s stories)_

Wanda Hale had been a strong woman. She was human – which was remarkable in a family of werewolves – and had this thick Romani accent. She used to tell stories of her life back in her home country, about how she had been the only one of her siblings to decide to take a chance on the United States. She would tell how she tricked Nazi officers in order to get out, how she met their grandpa in the docks – he had been waiting for his fiancée, but she never came; she had been waiting for her relatives, they never arrived either. About discovering werewolves and not being afraid, because most of the time humans were the real monsters. She told those stories after lunch, everyone sitting around her and listening attentively. 

She would also tell bedtime stories, but those were different. She would sit on the edge of his bed and talk about the wolf that fell in love with the moon, or the young lady that at night would howl with the wolves. His siblings usually fell asleep half way through. He couldn’t. 

He listened to every word she said, asked questions. He wanted to know if there were many wolves out there in love with the moon (all of you are a bit in love with her, my child), if the hunter that the young lady tricked would come back (he tried, but her pack was too strong). 

Not all of his grandma’s stories had a happy ending.

After the fire, Derek could only remember the ones that ended in tragedy. He couldn’t see a happy ending happening to him anymore. 

His grandmother always said that sadness was keen of him. 

Three. _(He missed his siblings)_

Derek actually had four siblings. People always thought about Laura, sometimes they talked about Cora, but no one besides him and Peter remembered the two others. Their names were Nina and David. She was the youngest of them all, three years younger than Cora, quieter than the rest of them. She was human and wanted to be an astronaut. His brother was two and a half years younger than Derek. He was too tall (when the fire happened, he was already Derek’s height) and had more energy than anyone in the house (he was in every sports club he could manage to get himself into, and a few more in which he shouldn’t actually be). 

The five of them were really close. Maybe because a pack did that to a person, or probably because they needed to join forces in order to beat Peter and his devilish pranks. They used to build pillow forts on the living room and watch all their favorite films. Laura liked Ten Things I Hate About You, Derek had a weak spot for The Fox and The Hound, David loved Space Jam, Cora was a Bettlejuice girl, Nina giggled all through The Parent Trap. They would sneak into the kitchen and steal snacks, trying to be silent but always ending up making so much noise their parents would wake up and they had to run back under the covers. 

When they went on a road trip, they would always begin teasing and tickling each other, but would inevitably end up falling asleep all together. 

He remembered David asking him about how he could charm a girl (back then, Derek thought he knew how to do it, he had gotten Kate Argent into his bed, he could do anything), because there was this charming girl from an allied pack that he wanted to ask on a date.

He remembered when Nina first noticed that she was different from the rest of them. When she cut her knee and didn’t heal right away. Instead of mopping around and complaining, she decided she was going to do amazing things. Derek was the one person she told that she planned on going to visit the moon for them, that she would be there and when they howled they would be howling for her. 

Neither of them got to fulfill their dreams, though. They, what was left of them, were buried with the rest of the Hales. 

Neither he nor Laura could deal with the pain. They couldn’t say their names, or think about them. So they never spoke of their siblings again, they carried their faces, their dreams and their smiles with them. They carried the guilt of not being able to save them. 

When Laura was gone, Derek carried it all by himself. 

Four. _(He missed trusting Peter.)_

Peter used to be the person Derek would tell his secrets to. He was ten years older, but they had been very close. He used to be the person that would whisper him the subtext in people’s arguments, that would tell dirty jokes, and the one that Derek would ask for advice on girls. 

It was mostly because Peter that Derek enjoyed Halloween. 

His uncle was the one to take him by the hand when Derek was eight and tired of wearing silly costumes, and walk down the street. When two boys approached them and teased Derek because he was dressed as Cap America, Peter smirked at them and said. _‘You know what makes Halloween so especial?’_ The kids shook their heads. His uncle flashed his eyes golden and said growling. _‘The monsters don’t have to wear any costumes.’_ The two boys ran and Derek couldn’t stop laughing at their scared faces. Peter kneeled in front of him – still with golden eyes – and asked if he could keep this a secret. _‘Talia would kill me if she found out.’_ Derek nodded happily. 

All the Halloweens following that, they would walk around Beacon Hills dressed in black scaring little kids that dared to point out they weren’t in costumes. Neither of them ever told Derek’s parents, or his siblings. That wasn’t for them. (They even tried taking Laura along one time, but she didn’t see the fun on it). 

After the fire, Derek couldn’t bear to look at his uncle’s burned and scarred figure. Because that was not his Uncle Peter, that was some shell of a person. His uncle Peter was smirks and sarcasm, always flirting with all the wrong girls and having silly arguments over which was the best action film.

When he discovered what Peter had done, Derek couldn’t hate him. Because Peter was family, he was all that Derek had left. He understood the pain and the anger, the need to avenge them. But he was mad, he couldn’t forgive him for Laura. Because his sister was the light, she was important. She was pack and she was family. 

He wished killing Peter had been harder. 

Five. _(He missed his mother’s scent)_

His mother had a unique scent, it was a mix of coffee, rain, wild flowers and (ironically) burning wood. Those were the parts he could name with something that actually had a scent, at least. She also smelled like home, safety and trust.

When he was little, she would let him crawl on her and his father's bed and drown himself on the scent of them. He would throw his little arms around his mom and hide his face on her collarbone, her fingers running through his hair, the feeling of protection surrounding him. When he grew too big for climbing on their bed, when Peter would tease him about being too attached to his mom, she would hug him for no reason. She would kiss his forehead and say he was a great boy. 

Derek had had a lot of nightmares growing up, haunting dreams that he couldn’t explain. He would be scared and edgy after them, but it was just a matter of his mom showing up by the door, her scent filling the room, that he would be okay. 

It was dumb, he knew. 

He should miss her voice, miss her warmth and her wise words. He should miss running in the woods with her. He should miss laying on the yard next to her wolf form. And, yes, he missed all those things. 

The problem with her scent was that years after it he could still feel it in places. He felt it on Deaton’s clinic, he could feel it on the woods all the time. He couldn’t feel it on the house, but that was no surprise. All he could smell there was pain and death. And even if he caught snippets of his mother’s scent everywhere, she was never there.  
When he had nightmares, she wasn’t by the door checking on him. When Kate Argent came to torture him, she wasn’t growling to protect her cub. When he tried to be a good alpha, an alpha like her, she wasn’t there to guide him. When he fell in love with a dumb teenager that would probably get himself killed, she was not there to hug him and tell him that everything would be okay. 

And one day, her scent wasn’t there either. 

He tried to catch it everywhere, but it was gone. 

Derek had lost the last thing he had from his family. He was officially and completely alone now. 

 

+One. 

No one would ever replace his family, he knew that deep inside him. There would always be a hole in his chest. 

That didn’t mean he couldn't find things that were both painfully similar to what he used to have and completely different. 

Melissa’s cooking was fantastic, and she did a really good job on making sure everyone was well fed and happy. Derek had been sort of astonished the first she pointed the wooden spoon at him and said: ‘You are staying for dinner.’ However, he learned that she was a terrific cook, and that she loved to receive compliments. She started calling him more often than not, usually letting him help her - even if she never let Stiles or Scott do it. 

He gave Melissa his and Laura’s cooking book the following Christmas. She cried as she hugged him, whispering she would take good care of it. 

The Sheriff was a great storyteller. Even better than Stiles, actually – which was something Derek didn’t believe could happen. John loves to tell stories about his days in the army, about the weird cases he got all the time in the station (not the supernatural related ones, just plain human weird). He would tell those to Derek when they were alone in the Stilinski house, after Stiles left for college, with a bottle of Jack between them. 

One time, the Sheriff told him about Claudia, about how he didn’t even remember her voice anymore. How he still loved her more than anything, how he wished she could’ve lived to see all this – well, not the killings and stuff, just the magic being real. In return, Derek told him about his family, he even told him about David and Nina. There were tears rolling down his face when he was done. John stared at him, baffled for a couple of moments, before pulling the young man for a strong hug. 

Derek wouldn’t ever say that it made him feel less lonely. 

He wouldn’t say he considered his pack to be his siblings. He had to say he cared a lot about those teenagers, though. He took Erica to take her driver’s license and she beamed a smile so big he almost felt his heart melting. Boyd asked him advice on how to ask her out, and Derek couldn’t help but to smirk when the two of them announced they were together. Isaac would play basketball with Derek, but he would also show up late on nights after he had a nightmare and just ask if Derek could stay with him on the living room until he was feeling safe again. Jackson always pretended he didn’t give two fucks about anyone, but he still bought Derek a new leather jacket when his old one torn. Scott would watch old movies with Derek, and then have a five hour discussion on the merits of The Lion King. Allison would go jogging with him from time to time, and though they were not really close, those silent moments were good. Lydia would listen to him, she would tell him her opinions and not give a shit if he thought she was wrong. And Stiles, well, Derek wouldn’t dare to think of him as a brother. 

His pack may be a bit broken, they didn’t have the best history or the best communication skills. They were working on it, though, and as Stitch would say (and Stiles would quote all the fucking time) “This is my family. I found it, all on my own. It's little, and broken, but still good. Ya. Still good.” That’s what they were now, a mixed and mismatched family, but still a family. 

Peter was always there too, even when no one wanted him. Derek would never trust him again, he couldn’t, but Peter was the only person that knew which days hurt the most, which days Derek would just want to hang on the loft sad and miserable. Those days, he would sit next to his nephew and just be there. Because even if Peter was crazy, and mean, and not above using other’s for his advantage, he still missed their family as much as Derek.

And at last came Stiles, with his too enticing scent - of pack, family, _safe_ \- that refused to go away even as Derek still tried. A scent that that calmed him even as he didn't admit to need it, that brought him back to himself when memories where suffocating, that obnoxiously wormed itself into his life.

Now, Derek would wake up in the morning to a bed that smelled like _them_. He would be able to hold Stiles, to drawn in his scent in. And when he was like this, just quietly hiding his face on the crook of his mate’s neck and he thought about everyone. 

About the family he lost.

And the family he found. 

Derek admitted that he was not alone, had never really been.


End file.
